If you’ve oversaturated your carpets while cleaning, a musty odour can be left behind. The smell is caused by your carpet remaining too damp for too long. To solve the problem, you’ll need to remove as much moisture as possible.
Before Cleaning
Before starting, maximise your Rug Doctor’s suction power by cleaning the dome filter to improve the vacuum airflow. Simply rinse the filter using clean water. You should be able to see through the filter.
During Cleaning
You can use your Rug Doctor carpet cleaner to suck excess moisture from your carpets. Simply repeat vacuum only passes, without pressing the red spray button.
After Cleaning
After vacuuming, allow your carpet to dry. If possible, open windows and doors to increase air circulation and ventilation. You can also use fans or air conditioners to speed up the process.
Over-wetting Issues
Rug Doctor machines use an extremely powerful 1.9hp vacuum motor and excel at removing excess moisture from carpets. We recommend you only go over the same area once when carpet cleaning to avoid over saturating your carpets. If a musty smell develops after carpet cleaning, we recommend re-cleaning using Rug Doctor Carpet Detergent and Rug Doctor Odour Remover combined in the machine. Rug Doctor Odour Remover uses a special enzymatic formula to tackle the source of odours.
Over-wetting can also cause stains to wick-up from the base of the carpet. If stains reappear, there are two solutions. For smaller stain areas, spot treat using Rug Doctor Urine Eliminator either as a standalone cleaner or by using a Rug Doctor. If you need to treat a larger area, use your Rug Doctor machine with a quicker cleaning motion and additional vacuum only passes.
